Union-backed group sues Dennis Richardson over election rule change

Our Oregon, a liberal political group funded by public employee unions, filed suit Thursday on behalf of a Multnomah County voter against Oregon Secretary of State Dennis Richardson in an attempt to halt changes to ballot measure rules Richardson approved earlier this week.

The crux of the suit is that Richardson's rule changes are unconstitutional and violate state law. The suit, filed in Marion County Circuit Court on behalf of voter Christine Mason, also alleges the rule changes "serve to undermine the peoples' power to initiate and refer measures."

The new rules, which took effect Tuesday, allow backers of a proposed ballot measure to gather signatures using a short summary written by Oregon's attorney general -- even during the period when that summary is under appeal at the Oregon Supreme Court.

Richardson, Oregon's first Republican secretary of state in 30 years, rebuffed the suit's claims in a tersely-worded newsletter sent Thursday night from his government email account. He cast the lawsuit as an effort by "wealthy special interest groups" to hamper voters' rights.

"Special interest groups are desperate to protect the power that is slipping out of their hands," Richardson wrote.

Under previous rules, petitioners could not gather signatures while the Oregon Supreme Court was deciding if a ballot title was accurate.

Richardson said court challenges are "frivolous" and meant to hamstring grassroots petition groups. Those groups are often pushing conservative causes. Challenges to the titles' wordings can languish before the Oregon Supreme Court for months due to the court's busy calendar.

Richardson said changes he approved to initiative petition rules are "citizen-friendly revisions" to "absurd" rules that make it difficult for ordinary people to put petitions on the ballot. The new rules, for example, end a requirement that signature sheets be printed on paper of a certain weight.

Lawyers in the Legislature's legal office gave Rep. Dan Rayfield, D-Corvallis, written advice in August that Richardson lacked authority to add a new route for initiative backers to get their petitions in front of voters.

Asked about the lawsuit, Gov. Kate Brown said Friday that all public officials need to act within "the confines of statute."

"Clearly there is some legal concerns about whether [Richardson's] actions are that," said Brown, herself a former Oregon secretary of state.

The suit asks the court to declare Richardson's actions invalid, to suspend them immediately and to bar the state from counting any signatures gathered while the ballot title was under appeal.

Our Oregon's lawsuit came a day after Rayfield invoked a law allowing members of the Legislature to get an official ruling on whether a rule change is constitutional. If Richardson's rules are not constitutional, the Legislature can move to effectively invalidate them.

In its lawsuit, Our Oregon said collecting signatures only after a ballot title is finalized is "one of the most basic, important and well-settled legal requirements" relating to initiative petitions. The reason for that, according to the court filing, is because the Legislature made clear that only final ballot titles may be used for signature collection "to protect Oregonians from fraud and misleading statements from signature collectors."

Dan Meek, co-chairman of the Independent Party of Oregon, said petitioners should be allowed to gather signatures during ballot title appeals because, in his view, they often result in little or no change to the title wording.

"Baseless ballot title challenges are routinely filed against important proposed measures, just to delay signature gathering by about 4 months," Meek said. "This can easily kill a petition outright or cause its supporters to fall short of collecting the required number of signatures."

Richardson previously told The Oregonian/OregonLive that he believes the rule changes are legal.

"I have evaluated the intent of the law as passed by the Legislature and believe that it is the job of the secretary of state to make the process for initiatives to be as friendly to the citizens as possible," he said last week.

In two separate press releases, Richardson thanked the League of Women Voters of Oregon for providing feedback on his rule proposals. Norman Turrill, the group's president, said Friday that the League of Women Voters largely opposed Richardson's changes, and noted that his press releases are not free from politicking.

The League of Women Voters eventually supported Richardson's revisions to ballot title rules as "something of a compromise," Turrill said, because Richardson's original proposal would have allowed petition circulators to gather signatures with no ballot title at all during the appeal process.

"Our main concern is that voters should know at every stage of the process what they are signing or voting on," Turrill said. "The Legislature will probably want to have the last word on this subject."

One conundrum presented by Our Oregon's lawsuit is who will represent Richardson in court.

State agencies and officials are represented by attorneys at Oregon Department of Justice, which is run by Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum, a Democrat. Kristina Edmunson, Rosenblum's spokeswoman, said the Justice Department is reviewing the lawsuit and "some pertinent legal issues." Edmunson would not say if Richardson can elect to hire his own attorney or whether he has indicated he intends to do so.